


these things will never change for us at all

by paintedpolarbear



Series: prompt fics [3]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff without Plot, M/M, Tumblr Prompt, warning for brief mention of adam's dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-06-09 17:35:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19480744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedpolarbear/pseuds/paintedpolarbear
Summary: ♡: Accidentally falling asleep together





	these things will never change for us at all

**Author's Note:**

> if I lay here / if I just lay here / would you lie with me and just forget the world?  
> —snow patrol, chasing cars

i. may 2012

“Show me.”

Ronan rejects the _Incoming call from: DICKLAN_ and shoves his phone as deep into his back pocket as it’ll go. “Do what?”

“I said,” Adam repeats patiently, fumbling with the lock on his bike, “I'm going to have to see the dreaming thing before I believe it.” His accent, a stifled, clipped thing this close to the Aglionby parking lot, nonetheless drifts into the vicinity of his vowels. _Going to_ slurs into _gonna_ ; an extra syllable finds its way into _said_ ; Ronan pokes at the crumbling edge of the sidewalk with the steel-capped toe of his boot, stuffing his hands in his pockets to make them be still.

“Chainsaw just wasn’t enough, huh?”

“One: You named it Chainsaw. Two: It’s a raven. How do I know you didn’t just find a nest somewhere? No, Lynch.” Adam straightens and points the padlock at him for emphasis, his small, crooked smile an open invitation for challenge. “You have to prove it.”

“Chainsaw is a she, not an it. And it's the wrong season for chicks, smartass,” Ronan says, just to be ornery. “And I can't go to the Barns. Am I supposed to roll my sleeping bag out on your shitty floor again?”

“That's not a way to talk about my floor. I think you hurt its feelings.”

Which means Ronan rolls up to St. Agnes just after sundown with a six-pack he won't drink, the homework he won't ignore, and a blanket he definitely won't forget in the morning. 

Adam’s left the door open a crack, so he doesn't bother to knock, just dumps his belongings in a pile on the shitty floor, and himself on the end of the worn mattress trying its hardest to pretend it's a bed. “The fuck is this?” he asks, as usual, bouncing hard enough to make the broken spring creak and pop. When Adam doesn't answer beyond a long-suffering sigh—they've had this conversation word for word a good half-dozen times, and he's busy scratching at homework—Ronan flops over, spread-eagle with his feet dangling off the edge to take up as much room as he possibly can. He fishes out a beer and sits the bottle on his chest, trying to decide if cracking it open without sitting up would be worth spilling Budweiser all over Adam’s bed. He decides not, and feels wise for doing so.

Ronan slides himself to the floor and reaches for a second bottle, proffering it in the direction of the desk. “Want one?” he quips, and Adam looks over his shoulder to fix him with the kind of silent, stony glare that he’s good at. It lasts long enough to make Ronan start squirming a little, feeling decidedly unwise, wondering if he's finally crossed the line. Then Adam shakes his head in exasperation and Ronan cracks the first bottle for a long, awkward swig in preparation for a long, awkward night.

“So,” Adam says finally, closing his textbook and reaching up to stretch his tired limbs. Ronan feels his heart speed at the sight of Adam’s skin, the bare strip a revelation under the hem of his shirt, and quickly looks away. “How does this work?”

Ronan shrugs and finishes the beer. “Well, first I have to fall asleep.”

Eventually, slouching against the foot of the bed, three beers in and making solid progress on the fourth, he does.

There's nothing about the dream worth remembering, just black-limbed trees and purple sky and thick, iron-dark fog. Just another generic nightmare in the daily procession of generic nightmares that have plagued his sleep for almost three years. It starts almost as soon as he closes his eyes, but Orphan Girl is nowhere to be seen.

He spots a glittering something in the dirt beneath a tree root, tiny and golden, and he lunges for it. Just as his fingers close around it, the sudden bite of a claw rips into his shoulder, and the dream ends.

The acrid, face-melting stench of a night horror is apparent immediately. Inwardly, Ronan balks. Of course he would bring back a night horror. Of course he would bring back his own personalized deadly weapon and release it in the cramped confines of Adam’s apartment. Of course he’d get himself killed—himself, if not the both of them—over having something to prove.

He hears Adam say _What the shit_ and then _Jesus Christ_ and the click-scrape of talons on wood and the panicked clatter of a box being thrown across the room. The mattress dips with a creak and he’s knocked to the floor by a thankfully-human elbow. Ronan tries to move, tries to scramble to his feet, tries to do anything except blink stupidly and watch a sideways vision of Adam scrambling away from a flurry of blood-black claws.

 _Move, goddammit,_ he demands of his sleep-numbed body. _Useless._ The more he tries, the longer it’ll take to wake up.

Feeling floods him just as the thing about-faces with a shriek, foregoing Adam in favor of easier prey. He rolls, narrowly avoiding getting his face shredded, and grabs for its leg at the same time that Adam brings a folding chair down on its head. It collapses with a croak, and by the third blow there’s no chance of it getting back up.

They remain, panting, for a long moment. Then, Adam says, half incredulous, half relieved, “Lynch, what the _fuck_?”

Ronan is paralyzed all over again. “Night horror,” he manages, feeling sick at the admission. “It was supposed to stay in the dream.”

He stares at the bird-man’s stinking corpse, black blood spilling through its damp feathers onto the floor. The first one had come when he was only nine, its three-winged visage a nightmare that, at the time, he was too young to understand. He’d screamed. Niall had stormed into the room, killed it with a butcher knife from the kitchen and then consoled his wailing son for hours, sewing up the worst of the jagged cuts and helping him bury the body out next to a stand of trees well back from the road. It had left him with one of his largest scars; only the tattoo was bigger.

After that, they’d stayed in the dreams until he was fourteen and he found his father's body in the driveway. They’d escaped a little more easily and a little sooner each time, like they followed a well-trodden path, but there’d only ever been a scant half-dozen in total. He hadn’t expected one to follow him to the waking world tonight.

Adam looks at him as though he’s not quite sure who—or what—he’s looking at, his wide eyes flitting between Ronan and the corpse like he’s afraid it will get up and move again. Ronan pushes himself to his feet and starts rummaging around for the blanket he’d packed.

“Now what?”

“Gotta get rid of the body, don't I?” he snaps. It would take a special kind of dick to leave it on the floor, and Ronan is too tired, too cut-open, too wrung-out, and too hungover to muster that special dickishness.

Adam quietly helps spread the blanket and roll the body onto it. He doesn't expect Adam to help drag it down the stairs and out the door, but he does. They manage to shove it between a couple of aspens on the edge of the parking lot, out of the sight of passers-by and churchgoers alike, and Ronan suppresses a belated shudder. He knows he has a lot of explaining to do, but he doesn't have the energy to do it tonight.

Adam spends a long minute standing in the parking lot, hands in the pockets of his threadbare sweats, staring blank-eyed at the edge of the wood. It's too quiet after the chaos of killing the night horror, but Ronan finds himself strangely loathe to break the silence. Instead, he stands next to Adam, hands in his pockets, watching the night creatures move through the underbrush.

At last, Adam says, “Are you okay?”

Ronan shrugs. “Just fucked in the head.” It's enough of a gross oversimplification to almost count as a lie, but only almost. He still prefers being wasted to being sober and he's failing out of school and God might not have meant to make him and all that's left of his family is an innocent doe-eyed brother and _Declan_ , but what little is left of him after all that can be said to be doing okay.

“Aren't we all.”

He laughs, small and bitter, and plucks something out of his pocket, tossing it to Adam, who catches it with ease. Adam holds it up to the moonlight to inspect its golden curves.

It's one of those tricky baubles that Ronan’s dreamt a hundred times if he's dreamt it once. A plain gold ring, always just too small to fit on your finger, three tiny imperfect diamonds embedded deep in the band. He doesn't have to look again to know what's carved on the inside: _ego fecit aurea. I am made of gold._

Meaningless bullshit.

“It's heavy,” Adam remarks, tossing the weight of it in his palm.

Ronan shrugs. “It always is. Don't put it on,” he warns, watching him about to try just that. “It won't fit, and then it'll get stuck forever. That’s how it always works in the dream.” 

Adam snorts and pockets the ring. Ronan can't describe the complicated pull of his stomach that accompanies it, and he doesn't really want to.

“Come on.” Adam turns and starts back to the stairs with a quick tilt of his head. “If I leave all that shit laying around on the floor Sister Linda will knock my head off with a golf club.”

Ronan waits a moment longer, lets the tension and fear and panic bleed out of him, and follows. 

ii. september 2012

Gansey reaches over the stack of shredded cereal boxes for where he’d left the glue bottle; it takes a couple of tries, but he manages to get the last front porch on Autumn Arbor secured just so, then rubs the crust out of his eyes. Blowing a deep, shaking sigh, he leans his forehead against his knee and blinks slowly, not willing to close his eyes fully. He wants coffee. He wants to call Blue.

There’s a knock at the door, one long, two short, that doesn’t quite manage to shake the hinges.

“Coming.”

But before Gansey even makes it to his feet, the still-locked door rattles open and there's Adam, bookbag dangling from his shoulder, white t-shirt rumpled and dirty from a late shift.

“I’ve been meaning to get that fixed,” Gansey stutters (although he hasn't, really, been meaning to get that fixed except in short, erratic bursts—he forgets it the moment he's alone again), uselessly standing in the doorway with his bottle of glue as Adam all but shoves his way inside. There's something unfocused about his eyes, Gansey thinks, and something tight and hunted in between his shoulders, but all he says is, “I was about to make coffee.”

He knows something is wrong when Adam doesn't say _Really? At midnight?_ or semi-politely and semi-obliquely refuse a cup, just nods absently and walks around the outer edge of the room to the futon.

Ronan’s bedroom door is ajar. For once, the volume of the music inside is at _tolerable_ rather than _brain-melting_ , and a quick glance inside reveals the cause: Chainsaw, unsupervised, is laboriously shredding the cord of his unplugged headphones. She looks up as they pass, croaks once, then returns to peeling the black insulation away from the wire.

Gansey skirts the cardboard Henrietta and busies himself with the coffee pot—filter, grounds, cold water, and away it chugs like a vintage model train. His calming ritual of choice in these sorts of hours. Adam remains worryingly silent perched on the edge of the futon, a bird ready to take flight, fidgeting with the strap of the bag on his shoulder. But Gansey’s made coffee already and he finds himself at a loss for words. Quite in the dark as to the _reason_ of Adam’s arrival at Monmouth and his subsequent reluctance to share with the class. Gansey takes another deep breath and resolves to solve this puzzle at a more reasonable hour. Possibly after a moderate amount of sleep.

Ronan emerges from the bathroom with his tank top hiked up over the hand that's scratching at his stomach. Adam very carefully looks at the proffered scratched-up bubblegum-pink mug full of steaming coffee. Gansey very carefully does not say anything.

Ronan seems to see them only after a long pause. A pair of headphones identical to the one Chainsaw is destroying is looped disdainfully around his neck, its cord draped over his shoulders with one end swinging freely, attached to nothing. For a minute, then two, nobody moves.

“Parrish,” Ronan says, voice low. “If you say you're fucking sorry I will knock you off that couch.”

Gansey doesn't miss the way Adam flinches, hard. Evidently, Ronan doesn’t either, because then he mutters, “Jesus, fuck, I didn't mean—”

“Shut up, Lynch,” Adam says. “Just—.” Adam shakes his head slightly as if to shake off an insect, the minutest disturbance of his posture, still gazing into the mug of coffee. He looks unbearably tired.

Ronan shuts up.

Adam scrubs a hand over his face. The floor and the coffee mug are eyeing each other with matching wary expressions. “God. For all you wanna act like the world’s biggest asshole—”

Ronan interrupts with a truly impressive noise of disdain. “Don't pretend you _aren't_ the world's biggest asshole more days than not.”

“Is _that_ what I'm supposed to be not-apologizing for?”

“Your turn to shut the motherfuck up.” Slowly, Ronan takes a careful step toward the futon, then another. “What happened wasn't your fault.”

There's only the faint lilt of Ronan’s music coming from somewhere in his pocket to drown out the subdued whine of the insects outside. Not for the first time tonight, Gansey is struck with the feeling of being left out. He strongly suspects that this conversation does not involve him in the slightest and that it would be wisest to keep his mouth firmly shut, so he pours his own cup of coffee and listens.

“Kinda feels like it was,” Adam mumbles, and takes a sip of his coffee. He’d once said Gansey’s coffee tasted _like a Starbucks employee pissed in a mop bucket_ , but either it had improved or Adam had become an expert in genteel old-money politeness, because his expression remains exactly the same. In fact, he takes another sip.

“Well it _wasn't_.” Ronan punctuates this with a casual shove at Adam’s head as he sprawls on the couch, sinking deep into the worn cushions—and just like that, the tension and anger are evaporated. Gansey feels the constriction in his heart ease. “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were at work.”

“I was.”

Ronan kicks his socks one at a time onto an unpainted business park. “And?”

“And after my shift I sat in my car across from the church parking lot for an hour and a half afterward then turned around and came here.”

“Whatever, Parrish, don't tell me—”

“My dad showed up at the apartment yesterday and I haven't been able to go back inside since.”

“ _Jesus_ Mary,” Ronan says into the thick silence that comes after a bomb. He does not need to elaborate. Then he taps on the screen of his phone. "I asked Gansey earlier if he thought you would laugh at this, and he said no, so you gotta watch it."

Gansey unplugs the coffee maker while he racks his brain for the details of Adam’s current legal arrangement with his father. Nothing is forthcoming, which is both unusual and mildly disconcerting. 

The sound of faint, tinny mewing startles him and he looks up from the coffeepot to see Ronan stretched out in the ultimate picture of laziness on the futon, face aglow in the blue-green light of his cell phone, laughing noiselessly at something on the screen. Adam is pushed in close with interest, looking—not content, not relieved, but something approximating not-upset, a neutral balancing of features that erases the dark furrow between his brows, the hard line of his tired mouth. Gansey made a mental note to himself about the video.

Some time later, Gansey dumps the remaining coffee into the sink and fills the pot with soapy water, being careful to rinse more than once. He retrieves a blanket from the perpetual floor-nest and drapes it over Adam and Ronan’s sleeping forms: the latter snoring quietly, the former disquietingly, almost deathly, still. He removes the pink mug from the futon and sets it in the sink. He sits cross-legged on the floor with a tin of off-white paint and sets to work on one of the houses in the old Cedarview neighborhood. He’ll call Blue later.

iii. june 2013

Somewhere in the house, a door slams.

It takes Adam several seconds to realize he’d frozen in response. His heart taps double-time against the inside of his sternum, waiting for the answer to _what did I do, what did I do, what did I do?_ until it hits him a breath later—the tension all melts out of him in a dizzying rush. There’s a dark trail of graphite at the end of the last word he’d written, from where he’d accidentally clamped down on the pencil too hard.

Really what he wants to do is kick his shoes off and crawl under the luxurious altitude of Ronan’s new king-sized duvet, all piled carelessly on the new queen-sized bed crammed carelessly into the former guest room, where Ronan keeps his belongings and sleeping habits. But it’s hardly three in the afternoon and Adam can’t quite justify closing the books yet, and besides, he hasn’t even opened his mail from three days ago: two official-looking envelopes with “ATTN: Mr. Adam Parrish” typed at the head of the St. Agnes address and a catalogue for an adult business that Adam isn’t certain exists.

Boot steps in the kitchen; Ronan’s left the front door open again, as evidenced by the very clear tinkling of the windchimes hanging out front and the waves of hot air just blasting into the house. The Orphan Girl stomps down the hallway with intense purpose, dragging an old black tree branch behind her in a direct beeline to the back porch. She bumps into him purposefully as absent-minded greeting, but doesn’t slow her march.

Adam sighs and shuts his textbook, kicks off his shoes, and curls up on the bed, not even bothering to pull the covers around him.

When he blinks awake, sore and vaguely nauseous, the shadows are long and violet, sharp-edged against the red-and-gold sunset light. Chainsaw is sound asleep in her cage. There’s a warm and familiar weight in the bed beside him, and he rolls over to find Ronan snoring soundly under a pile of quilt.

For no reason Adam can discern, his heart feels like it’s swelling against the inside of his ribs, pushing the air out of his lungs, trapping him in a cocoon of languid contentment. He doesn’t want to move. He barely wants to breathe.

Ronan looks like a different person altogether when he’s sleeping; the facade of anger and bitterness melts away from the soft inner workings, the tender hands, the soft-bellied smiles reserved for small animals and baby brothers and Adam. The sharp edges, the gnarled thorns, all of it smoothed into silk.

Adam thinks watching the sunsetted shadows of the forest play across the bridge of Ronan’s nose feels like picking at a scab. He thinks maybe he doesn't intend to let it heal. He touches the edge of the pale bump of a scar just on the point of Ronan’s eyebrow, tracing the line of it with the barest fingertip.

It’s hard to tell how long they lie there, too warm in the purple sunlight and too comfortable in this bed that’s too big for both of them. The shadows lengthen, and lengthen, and lengthen, until they blur into nighttime darkness that feels just small enough to hold both of them. Adam can’t bring himself to get up, not when the moonlight turns the outline of everything into a silver halo and Ronan’s blanket is warmer than anything and Ronan’s just brought something back from a dream.

He thinks maybe it should feel strange that he can tell, but…. This—this _thing_ , this relationship, this unnameable constellation of gives and takes—it's no game. And not playing a game means hearing the slight shift in his breathing that tells the difference between asleep and awake. It means knowing the furrow between Ronan’s eyebrows, the glassy tint of his unmoving eyes, the ridges of tendon in his clenched fingers, the hiss of breath between clenched teeth. 

Not playing a game means knowing the exact moment that feeling and movement rush into Ronan’s limbs all at once, means knowing the first thought in Ronan’s head is _oh fuck what is it this time?_

“Hey.”

Ronan sits up, pushing the duvet into a pile of gray cloud balled up between his knees and tucked under his chin. There’s no blood, no broken bones, no splattered mud or dirt, just a light sheen of sweat on Ronan’s wrinkled brow, and Adam’s heart beats a little more slowly.

“Hey ‘urself,” he mumbles into the blanket. His fist is clutched around something that gleams between his fingers. He makes no move to open it.

The front door must still be open, because he can hear the sound of hooves tapping back and forth across the tile, the hot and rain-heavy wind blowing into every corner, the screen door beating against the frame. 

Adam waits. 

Ronan relaxes with a long sigh, the lines of his body uncoiling into something fluid and shapeless, slumping sideways onto Adam and yawning widely. Adam traces over Ronan's hairline with his fingertips, the well-worn path familiar enough to tread without looking; and he waits.

Ronan's fist uncurls. Balanced in the meat of his palm is a plain gold ring, shiny with sweat, large enough to fit on an index finger or thumb. He wordlessly holds it up to the moonlight and lets it glisten.

“That’s different.” Adam takes the ring with his other hand and looks curiously: it has no gem, no setting, no ornament, not even a maker’s mark, just a bit of engraving on the inside that he can’t quite make out. _Dream to reality_ , he thinks, and shivers.

Ronan snorts. “The dream was different.” He rolls over and paws at the bedside lamp until it lights up a soft orange, then kicks all the blanket back over to Adam’s side of the bed. “Not like when I used to shit out those Chinese finger trap things by the pound. More calm. Or controlled, I guess. Just nice and fuckin' normal."

“Calm is good,” Adam hums, the cold shiver on the back of his neck growing more intense as he squints at the inside of the band. The table lamp casts deep shadows, the same violet-black as the night sky through the window, but the ring’s inner carving comes into sharp focus: _cor mea fecit aurea. My heart is made of gold._

Adam's heart _thunks_ into his throat.

Ronan isn’t saying anything else, just restlessly shuffling through a pile of stuff on the floor. After an evening of rest, they're both gearing up for a night of restlessness.

It feels alive and untamed and hungry. Like not only is anything possible, but tonight is the night it will _happen_.

Adam finds himself fidgeting with the ring, slipping it onto one pinkie, then the other, then an index finger when it's apparent it's too loose on the pinkie, then a thumb, where it fits. The metal is warm and heavy, a weight on his hand that won’t be forgotten, and he can’t stop looking.

Ronan turns around, catches a glimpse of Adam’s uplifted hand with the ring shining in the lamplight, goes utterly still.

“Hey,” he croaks, eyes crystalline and wide, “that’s different.”

“I guess so.” Adam lets his arm fall back down to the pillow and closes his eyes. He swallows, uncertainty twisting in his gut. _Cor mea fecit aurea._ “I think I’m gonna keep it, um, if that’s okay.”

Ronan remains unmoving for a pulseless moment. Then, he nods. "Yeah." His face is an open wound of stupefaction. 

“Parrish.” Ronan pauses, clears his throat, and tries again. “I wasn’t gonna—”

“I know.” And Adam does. There are some things that are just _certain_ , regardless of circumstance, whether they feel certain or not, whether it’ll be years before they’re ready. The certainty will be there just the same. He can feel that certainty now.

Adam rolls over and pulls the blanket around himself. His heart is finally still.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks @moreraventhanothers for the prompt!
> 
> (Dates are approximate)


End file.
